Tandarin

If you have a round peg that doesn’t fit in a square hole, do you blame the peg or the hole?

You probably blame neither.

We don’t assign blame to inanimate objects. But you might have some questions about the person who provided you with these mismatched items and set you up to fail.

If a lion and a zebra show up at the same watering hole, and the lion kills the zebra, whose fault is that? Maybe you say the lion is at fault for doing the killing.

Maybe you say the zebra should have chosen a safer watering hole. But in the end, you probably conclude that both animals acted according to their natures, so no one is to blame.

However, if this is your local zoo, you might have some questions about who put the lions with the zebras in the same habitat.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, flirting, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior.

That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.

In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes.

Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained animals, all hell would break loose.

All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

Consider Hugh Hefner. He had every benefit of being a single man, and yet he decided he needed to try marriage. Marriage didn’t work out, so he tried the single life again. That didn’t work out, so he planned to get married again, although reportedly the wedding just got called off.

For Hefner, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.

To be fair, if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers.

Everyone is different. But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires. I don’t have a solution in mind. It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa.

And there’s no real middle ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your underpants still on. Some things just don’t have a compromise solution.

Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge, he also doesn’t miss it.

Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.

That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object.

You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages.

I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.

Let's say that the country of Tandaria has been discriminating against left-handed people for the past 800 years.

Eventually the lefties organize politically and they fight for their rights. How will the lefties know when they have won the fight?

Conceptually, equality happens when everyone is treated the same. You can easily measure that for an issue such as voting. If lefties have the right to vote, and full access to information, and there are no reports of intimidation at the polls, you're probably there.

And you can easily examine laws to see that they apply equally to lefties and righties. You can even check to see if juries comprised of both lefties and righties convict all types of people at the same rate in all parts of Tandaria.

But how do you measure economic equality?

Obviously you could measure the average salaries for both lefties and righties, and you could measure rates of hiring. But somewhere along the path to full economic equality, the country will have pockets that favor righties and pockets that favor lefties.

For example, some companies will be actively recruiting lefties to comply with political pressures, and other companies will continue discriminating, perhaps at a subconscious level. Some regions in Tandaria will be more progressive and others will lag. And lefty entrepreneurs might start doing some discrimination of their own by hiring mostly lefties.

My question is this: When the lefties can find plenty of employers that favor lefties, and the righties can find plenty of employers that favor righties, and the occupations and compensation across all of these jobs are similar, has economic equality been achieved?

This is an important question for Tandaria because the nation might reach "compartment equality" decades before every individual employer starts treating lefties and righties the same.

Somewhere on the path to economic equality, the problem transforms into one of mobility and information. And in the modern age, neither mobility nor information is much of an obstacle.

By analogy, an army of a hundred fighters can defeat an army of a thousand if the smaller army has better mobility and information. The trick is for the army of a hundred to catch small groups of fighters from the larger army in isolated situations, kill them and run. Repeat.

My view is that left-handed Tandarians have full economic equality when the only obstacles to equal pay are mobility, information, and strategy. And that point happens when perhaps only half of the employers in Tandaria have become enlightened.

I was thinking about this as I read a pundit's article that said Indian women make 60 paise on the rupee compared to men, but in metropolitan areas, young women are starting to earn more than young men.

(Most of my readers already know that the 60 paise figure is bogus, but that's another issue.) My question is this: When should women declare victory in economic equality?

Is compartment equality close enough?

We humans start our lives at the peak of our popularity. Everyone loves babies. The trouble starts when we learn to speak. Talking is the process by which we transform from adorable to insufferable. The more we talk, the less appealing we become.

No topic is safe. If things are going well for you, and you make the mistake of talking about it, others will think you're a self-absorbed bragger. If things are going poorly for you, and you talk about it, others will think you're a gloomy downer. If you talk about other people, you're a gossip. If you freely offer your opinion on the pros and cons of things, you'll be seen as too critical or too opinionated.

If you talk about politics, the people who disagree with you will see you as either an immoral ass hat or a superstitious simpleton.

The people who share your viewpoint will see you as a bore because you're stating the obvious and probably taking too long to do it.

The old saying is that it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. It's unambiguously true that the more you talk, the higher your odds of saying something that is memorably stupid, cruel, selfish, or evil.

Telling amusing stories is okay in small doses. But storytelling is a rare skill. And the people who know you well have heard all of your best stories. Every story you tell will lower your average.

One situation in which talking works well is when two analytical or academic people share opinions and information on topics of common interest. That can be stimulating, especially if one or both people have a sense of humor. But if those two people spend much time together, they start running out of fresh topics. The more they talk, the less interesting they become to each other.

The rules of conversation are a bit different for people who don't know each other well or don't see each other often. In those cases, a bit of extra chatter is useful to keep the awkwardness at bay. But as you spend more time with an individual, every word you utter makes you less desirable.

Lately I have been wondering if there's an antidote for the social decay caused by talking. One fix is to spend more time with strangers. But that would be exhausting and hollow.

You could try doing more listening and less talking. People like that. But listening with empathy has the perverse effect of rewarding the talker for sharing his woes.

That's a problem because if you cause someone to focus on his own misfortune, you make things worse for him. In time, the talker will associate you with all of his most unpleasant thoughts because that's the connection you keep reinforcing.

My best solution for the scourge of talking is this: Be brief and say something positive.

Brevity will slow the inevitable decline in your popularity caused by talking. And saying something positive as often as possible will be a mood booster to whoever is in the room with you. Humans are followers, and if you set a positive tone, it rubs off.

You'll never regain the personal appeal you enjoyed as a baby. But if you say nice things, and don't say much, you might become relatively less unappealing than the people around you.

And that's not nothing.

Here's a tip for falling asleep. I don't think you'll see it anywhere else.

It goes like this: Don't think words.

By that I mean don't imagine conversations that you plan to have, and don't replay in your head conversations you've had.

It's impossible to clear your mind of all thoughts. But I find it somewhat easy to switch off the language center of my brain. What happens after that is a flow of images, starting with ones that make some sense to my current life, quickly followed by randomness, then sleep. It usually takes less than a minute.

Let's say something is bugging you, or fascinating you, and the thought is keeping you awake. I'll bet that in those situations you're obsessed with the verbal elements of your problem. You're imagining what you will say to someone, or how you will explain yourself, or maybe what words someone else chose when annoying you.

To fall asleep, don't abandon the troublesome topic, because you probably can't. Just picture the situation in images alone. That will satisfy the part of you that can't let go of the problem while putting you on the sleep trajectory.

To be fair, I have no idea if this method will work for you. It's just something I discovered that works for me.

My wife hates my ability to sleep just about anywhere. Few days back, I dropped off for a few minutes while watching a new movie. I would have awakened in ten minutes on my own, refreshed and ready to drive home.

But that plan went off the rails when Shaila decided it would be funny to slap me in the chest and see what I would do if I woke up suddenly to a loud action sequence in the movie. I'm told it was hilarious.

Anyway, if you try my sleep tip, let me know if it works for you.

The common sense view of pain and pleasure is that humans seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. Lately I've come to wonder if that's backwards, or at least incomplete. I see too many examples in which people appear to be chasing pain.

My theory is that our biggest motivator is the need to feel alive, and that pleasure isn't a sharp enough feeling to get us there. When you're bored or lonely, you're feeling something closer to death than life. And so you seek out pain to remind yourself that you're alive.

By this theory, the quest for pain is the primary motivator of all major life choices.

One test of a theory is that it can predict people's actions. And indeed you can see that people routinely choose activities that deliver pain. Consider a distance runner, for example. The health benefits of running are largely achieved in the first few miles. The rest is a pain that confirms we are alive.

You might argue that runners get a high, and they get great satisfaction from achieving a better time or finishing a marathon.

I'm going to argue that the pleasures are side benefits. But first I will add one more condition to my theory: Everyone chooses the pain they like best. For the runner, muscle pain is the drug of choice. For a soldier in a volunteer army, it might be the fear of combat, or the harsh living conditions.

For the entrepreneur, it might be the fear of failing. Everyone picks their own brand of pain. Sometimes we call that pain "challenge" to disguise it.

So far, all of the activities I mentioned have identifiable pleasures. The soldier gets the feeling of pride in serving the country, veteran benefits, and sometimes the thrill of combat. The entrepreneur gets the satisfaction of doing things his own way, and with any luck, riches too.

These examples are ambiguous because the participants get both pain and pleasure.

And if these examples were the only ones we had, I would not have a theory. We also need examples where people clearly choose pain over pleasure. That would be the best evidence for the theory.

Consider sports. Most sports are designed to guarantee failure for the majority of participants. In amateur tennis, if you join a league, and you start winning more than you lose, the computer rankings bump you up to the next level where you will mostly lose.

You would think that a system designed to make participants feel like losers most of the time would become extinct, but it actually thrives.

Golf is an entire game built around making something that is naturally easy - putting a ball into a hole - as difficult as possible, to guarantee plenty of losing.

In football you're normally thwarted every few yards. In baseball you strike out more than you hit. If winning were the payoff, sports would be a business where participants paid opponents to intentionally lose.

Perhaps you think losing is necessary to make the winning feel good. But consider small kids. For them, life is so vivid that they need no reminder they are alive. Every second is a miracle. And little kids prefer activities with no losing whatsoever. Only the winning appeals to them.

As we get older, and our sensation of living dulls, we seek the pain that confirms our existence. We seek sports to increase our losing.

You might know people who continuously make choices that put them in some sort of danger, economically, socially, or physically. To you, their choices seem unwise. You assume that the people who make those choices get some sort of payoff you can't understand. I think the payoff is the pain itself, and the attendant feeling of being alive.

If sadness is your preferred pain, you watch sad movies. If muscle soreness is your preferred pain, you exercise vigorously. If economic uncertainty is your preferred pain, you pick fights with your boss. If stress is your preferred pain, you make sure you don't leave enough time to do what you need to do.

This theory came to me recently when a number of people asked me, in all seriousness, if I've gone insane. It seems to the reasonable observer that I've intentionally stirred up more trouble for myself in this blog than can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure.

Where's my payoff?

If you look at most of my career choices, they have in common an unusually high risk of public criticism. I like the pleasures of success, but I need the pain of criticism. And because mine is a relatively rare form of preferred pain, it looks like insanity to the casual observer. To me, extreme sports look like a form of insanity. To each his own.

Consider your own life choices as an adult.

Do you have a preferred pain for feeling alive?